Posted on 12/13/2002 1:48:36 PM PST by Davis
When Senator Ton Daschle, in the grip of post-party depression two weeks after his job as Senate Majority Leader was swept away in the midterm elections, held a press conference in Washington, D.C., he pretended to cast blame for the loss on talk radio in general and Rush Limbaugh in particular. This was preposterous, of course, a hissy fit unbecoming a grown-up much less a senator of these United States. Daschle was ridiculed,--even worse, he was quoted--but much of the media response wasn't quite on target.
No one asked him why he had not divulged Limbaugh's nefarious machinations way back in October or September, that is, in time to do something about it. Indeed, he was interviewed repeatedly on election night and didn't breathe a word of it then. A late discovery sets one wondering. And no one in the press, as far as I know, recommended a course of intensive grief counseling or, in the alternative, that he be whipped soundly and sent to bed without supper.
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Daschle's performance was, as I've said, preposterous, but Albert Gore, Jr., in a telephone interview with Josh Benson of the New York Observer, a New York City weekly of small circulation topped Daschle's foolishness by a wide margin. Mr. Gore, you may remember, lost the 2000 presidential election. It was a terrible blow, and he seems not to have recovered. Noemie Emery, an astute observer, makes a plausible case for his having gone ga-ga in consequence.
Gore made no reference to his own fixed idea--I won, didn't I? Who is that interloper in the White House?--but he did declare to Benson, "The media is kind of weird these days on politics..." Look who's calling who "weird"--the guy who paid Naomi Wolff $15,000 a month to coach him on how to be an Alpha male and dress in earth tones.
Mr. Gore went on to assert "...and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party." This is progress toward recovery, surely, hearing major institutional voices rather than minor private ones whispering insistently, "You won, you won."
But this was mere preamble, a stroll in the park for Mr. Gore. Consider this outburst: Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, The Washington Times and the others. And then they''ll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they''ll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they''ve pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these R.N.C. talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist.
You heard? From the Republican National Committee to Fox News, the Washington Times, and Rush Limbaugh, all to be woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist.
And that's not the end of it. How about this from Gore in pseudo-visionary mode. The introduction of cable-television news and Internet news made news a commodity, available from an unlimited number of sellers at a steadily decreasing cost, so the established news organizations became the high-cost producers of a low-cost commodity....They're selling a hybrid product now that''s news plus news-helper; whether it''s entertainment...
The triumphant coda in which, according to Benson," Mr. Gore can only attempt to explain what motivates the ceaseless lampooning he continues to face from America's columnists and commentators." That's postmodernism.[said Mr. Gore] It's the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism..."
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In his op-ed column for the Washington Post, Michael Kelly applied a cool compress to Mr. Gore's feverish prose. Kelly, an engaging and perceptive essayist (and also the brilliant editor who brought the Atlantic Magazine back from the grave) dug up the numbers that show the mainstream media are, as they have been for sixty years or more, dominated by liberals and liberal voices, overwhelmingly Democratic. There is no truth to Senator Daschle's and former Vice President Gore's fantasies that the Republican National Committee gives marching orders to the press and that a cabal of news media outfits financed by "wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires" is the cause of their distress.
I won't dwell on their reasons for promoting these untruths. I am content to conclude that Daschle and Gore and their party must think they benefit from it. It is hard to see why they think so. But, one conclusion is clear. They have abundant, overwhelming contempt for us, the people, the citizenry. Since there's no doubt we can't think for ourselves, it must be that we're deluded. Yes, that's gotta be it.
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